Since September 2011, more than 20,000 Sudanese refugees have arrived in Ethiopia, fleeing conflict in the neighboring Blue Nile State of Sudan. Many more are still hiding in bushes in the border area, hoping to go back home to collect their belongings before settling in a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

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Nazar and his family registering at the Admazine refugee camp. WFP/Judith Schuler

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“I finally reached a safe place where I will receive shelter, food and other basic necessities”, said Nazar when he and his family just arrived in the Admazine refugee camp in North-Western Ethiopia. “For the moment, I am just happy to see other people and to meet people from my village who I haven’t seen for a while. I don’t want to think about anything else.” Nazar, his wife and their two children have been hiding in the bushes in the border area between Sudan and Ethiopia for the past five months, eating wild roots and drinking water from the river. Fighting was ongoing all around them and they constantly had to change their location. When the family’s home was burned down, they were forced to flee the area altogether - all they were able to take was a change of clothes and their radio. Two days prior to their arrival in the Admazine camp, Nazar’s family managed to cross the border into Ethiopia. People from the local community, Gemed, found them in the forest and brought them to the village where they received their first real meal in a long time. This small, rural village which subsists on agriculture and very basic gold mining has been hosting more than 3000 people since September, providing food and shelter. Even though people in the host community hardly have enough to cover their own needs, they are all happy to help because they want to support their neighbors and, as they say, save their lives. WFP currently provides food assistance to almost 300,000 refugees in Ethiopia, including 50,000 from Sudan. In addition to general food rations, malnourished children and pregnant and nursing women receive Supercereals, a fortified food, which helps them to regain weight. Given the unstable situation in three neighboring countries – Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea – the number of refugees in Ethiopia increases on a daily basis.

The after-effects of the successive droughts and high food prices that struck Ethiopia during 2008, pushing 12 million people into hunger, continue to pose significant challenges for WFP operations in the country in 2009.

For all operations in 2009 WFP is planning to reach 9.7 million beneficiaries with 744,000 metric tons of food valued at US$ 624 million.

The relief programme alone requires 665,500 metric tons of food and targets 8.5 million people – close to five million beneficiaries in need of emergency food and nutrition support, 2.4 million under the Government’s Productive Safety Net Programme, 1.2 million involved in Targeted Supplementary Food programmes and 164,000 HIV/AIDS patients and their families.

Operations in 2009 will strongly focus on the Somali Region where 1.7 million people—close to 40 percent of the population—suffer from food insecurity. WFP has launched an innovative “hubs-and-spokes” delivery model in the Somali Region which has vastly improved the distribution of food and nutrition assistance.